Patricia Smith
Further Resources
Seen on these playlists
Sestinas Bust My Brain (to Start with)
Contemporary poetry has made me fall in love with poetic forms, even the very complicated and uncompromising form that is The Sestina. While it makes so many demands on you as a poet, there is something to be said for those who make more than music of its many rules, who make you realize that the strictest of poetics forms are less about restriction and more about innovation, craft and the repetitious, incanting magic of end words. While I will always be a free verse poet at heart, I'm grateful how poetic forms have challenged me by teaching me a more urgent kind of diligence while having a stronger sense of "direction." These are some of my favorite sestinas, which I regularly teach in workshop, which often win over the most free-verse-loving of students.
View playlistBlackness and apocalypse
These poems are primarily meant to reflect my ongoing interest in how black writers have navigated the end of the world, the ends of worlds, cataclysms and shifts in the landscape. How over and against that utter lack of safety or security, they have dared to imagine a future. And what’s more, a global vision in which the present social hierarchies and arrangements do not carry the day. In the midst of storms, hurricanes, political upheaval and nuclear threats, these writers, and the tradition in which they work, assert an alternate, unflinchingly optimistic story of humankind. They dare us to dream of other ways that things could be, count that dreaming as praxis, and build with our most radical visions in mind. Every apocalypse is also a revelation, an opening, another chance. These poems are rooted in that long-standing, fundamental truth. They are preparation for the earth that is yet to come.
View playlist